php include statement

Question

I'm working on my first website using php. I came up with a good way, or so I thought, to deal with including the css sheet depending on where I am. For example, I have a form that I submit to with this code:

 $root = '../';


 function died($error) 
 {
  include '../includes/header.php';
  echo "We are very sorry, but there were error(s) found with the form your submitted. ";
  echo "These errors appear below.<br /><br />";
  echo $error."<br /><br />";
  echo "Please go back and fix these errors.<br /><br />";
  include '../includes/footer.php';
  die();
 }

I set the variable $root to have "../" and then here is the relevant part of header.php:

<link href="<?php echo $root;?>styles/styles.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

I would think that it would put in "../" in front of styles, but it doesn't put anything. Why doesn't this work?

Thanks!

Answer 1

You can make the path to your CSS file absolute:

<link href="/styles/styles.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

Prefixing a URL with a forward slash (/) will make the URL relative to your site's root. The above example would reference something like http://example.com/styles/styles.css. This way, you can put all your CSS in a folder at the root of your site and not have to worry about the path at all.

Answer 2

In this situation my suggestion is to use $root = "FULL path";

So for example... if your web root is in "/var/www/html/" and you are working on a project lets call it sampleProject which is in "/var/www/html/sampleProject".

Set $root="/sampleProject/; and this way when you use things such as styles/styles.css"/> you end up with which is what you want.

Unlike other answers this makes your code more portable in my oppinion. For example if you move your site "sampleProject" to /var/www/html/dir1/dir2/dir3/sampleProject/ all you need to do is change $root="/dir1/dir2/dir3/sampleProject/" and it will still work. Whereas if you use explicit full path as some suggest you will have to change this everytime you move your site.

Answer 3

$root is not in scope for the function (im assuming..) add global $root; to the top of the function and it should work.

$root = '../';

function whatever() {
  global $root;

  echo "<link rel=stylesheet type=text/css href=\"" . $root . "something.css . "\">";
}

Answer 4

For referencing files such as this you simply need to start the path with a forward slash and the path is then relative to your root directory...

<link href="/styles/styles.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />